The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. However, assuming that LSI is charging at least 1 cent per Mbyte for its systems, the CGG contract would be worth -- at a minimum -- $10 million.

Paris-based CGG provides a range of seismic data acquisition, processing, and geoscience services and software to clients in the oil and gas industry, including BP, Exxon Mobil Corp., and Royal Dutch/Shell Group.

The company requires huge amounts of data storage for the seismic images it provides to customers and currently has around 3 petabytes (3,000 Tbytes) of data on LTO tape cartridges, served by an Advanced Digital Information Corp. (Nasdaq: ADIC) tape autoloader to several thousand clustered Unix servers.

Guillaume Cambois, executive VP of data processing and reservoir services at CGG, says the company wanted to move to a higher-performance storage infrastructure. "We've been pressed by clients to deliver data faster, so we've pushed to reduce the turnaround time," he says.